I keep seeing threads by people who are frustrated in their attempts to create a new alliance. So allow me to give a little advice.

First, why are you starting an alliance? There are lots of good ones out there already. There are only two answers. The first is that you're already a group of friends who hangs out and attacks and defense together, you might as well give yourselves a name and invite others to join. This is by far the best way to start an alliance.

The second is that you are a power hungry person in search of peons to direct at your whim. This is also fine, but you'll have to do a lot more work to be even slightly successful. If this is you, just be honest with yourself about it, it will make things so much easier down the road.

Now answer some questions:

Do you know what IRC is? Have you ever attacked with a group of people before? Have you ever had to organize other people's fleets to defend someone elses planet?

If the answer to any of these questions is NO, then you will not be successful until you've spent a little time learning the ropes from an established alliance. Don't worry, you can still take over the universe some day, just not this round. Allow the people who have perfected the art to teach you their ways. You will use their own knowledge to crush them.

Now, some more questions:
Are you on IRC most of your day? Will you be active for at least one full round of Planetarion and the month or so before? Do you know anyone you can trust absolutely to help you out?

If the answer to these questions are NO, then you've got to seriously re-examine whether its going to be worth your time and effort to try this out. If you can't be around running your alliance most of the day, then its not going to go anywhere. PA is a 24 hour game. You have to be here for the full round, its not fair to your members for you to back out on them after 3 weeks because your mum forgot to pay the internet bill. And you have to have help. People you can trust to make sound judgements will be essential, because you have to sleep, and someone has to mind the store while you're away.

So if you can pass those basic questions, then you're ready to get started.

First if you're not experienced, and want help, get on #mentors on IRC. There PA has assembled a group of people who are both politically neutral and eager to help people do just what you are doing now.

Second, start a channel. PIck a word for your alliance, join that channel. Once you're the only one there with an @ by your name, you've arrived at your new home.

Third, get those people you can trust in there, and get P in your channel.

Now you're set to begin recruiting by word of mouth, but NO ANNOUNCEMENTS. If you can't get at least 10 people in your alliance just on your friends, galaxy mates, their friends, etc, then its a failed experiment.

Once you have an established core memberbase, some very basic infrastructure, and a little experience, you're ready to come to this board and announce your alliance. You will not tell them how crap your alliance is, and how you're new and don't know what you're doing. You will tell them what you've accomplished, how many dedicated active players you have, about your desire to do well next round, about your strong tight knit community, or any other GOOD things you have.

YOU WILL NOT POST ON THIS BOARD WITHOUT HAVING AN IRC CHANNEL.

To do so shows everyone in the world that you've ignored every piece of advice available to you. You WILL require your members to be in IRC on a regular and consistent basis. The in-game forums, and attack and defense tools are not meant to be adequate and will not be even laughablly sufficient for you to be half-way serious about this.

If you've done everything here and you've got a small memberbase, then you may be ready to be an alliance that people take seriously. You may not be experienced, and you have many many more lessons to learn, but if you can't master these prerequisites, you just can not be successful in this game.

Good Luck!

Amended Dec 18 2004. You are explicitly forbidden from using or in any initial alliance recruitment posts.

You can have a decent alliance started with only 2 people.
IRC is not a must if you want to start an alliance. Having a real time means of communication with your members will be a must if you want to do well though.
Running an alliance is a lot of hard work. If you don't have the officers you can trust to do it for you, you have to do it all by yourself.

There's some decent alliances out there that need members. If you can be patient enough and willing to put in a lot of hard work, you can be running that alliance (or start your own) after a round or so.

I started round 1, I was a Fury Oficer and then Executive by the end of round 2, I continued as an active executive through round 5ish and an inactive one after that. I've run cluster/parallel alliances in every round I played except the first one. I've run top 100 planets, I've GC'd a top 10 galaxy. Thats just my PA leadership career. I've recently become a founding leader of 1up.

Listen to me. Do not listen to Gerbie.

Gerbie's only real point worth discussing is that its true, IRC in specific isn't strictly necessary, as long as you have real time communication to all your members. However IRC is the most efficient and desireable way to do this. MSN Messenger, or even a cell phone network should be supplementary at best. If you're going to tell someone how to start an alliance, we'll start by telling them how to do it right, not every variation that might possibly work if they don't mind it sucking.

i dissagree Gerbie, irc is the one thing you must have, it is almost uncomprehensible for an alliance to run through msn or icq for example. Irc allows the realtime communication and it also presents a convienient and useful meeting place for potential recruits.

great post Cayl

__________________
George Bush visited East London where i live recently. He was interviewed by a couple of children selected from local schools. One of the questions, asked by a 10year old lad, was "Whats the White House like"

The most powerful man in the world who regularly faces some of the toughest questioning in the world by the best journalists answered........

I started an alliance once(Insomnia). Well r10.5 acutally. There were several reasons for it going down. Ill mention them so others might be more careful when they start theirs...

First of all, it was very hard to get members. I managed to get a good core, and we had all chances to survive(cause the alliance started as a group of friends with me as the one taking the initiative)
We couldnt make a good fight on our own, so we seeked someone to work with(think we had 40 members at that point. growing slowly)
FAnG and Dragons(+ Virus and some others) were interested at the time. Unfortunatley, as they suffered the same lack of members as us, they only wanted to consume us and get our members(who were of a high quality standard). We were offered BG and Wing status, but they wanted our members as theirs(ingame etc). We would loose our identity so we said no. We had quite some names in it, unfortunatley alliances like FAnG got power and managed to talk someone into spying/sabotaging the allaince in its early stages.(wont mention the names)
After alot of work, 2 spies were uncovered, but by the they had done ALOT of harm already. We lost some members and it all went horribly difficult.
Then, when the round had started, many members(myself included) found out PaX was crap, and as members starting giving up before we had really begun, I had no choice but to give it up. I hope sometime to manage to start an alliance again, with my friends(or whats left of them), but atm the playerbase isnt too big, and few dare leave their already established alliances for a new one, well unless it contains names like Synthetic_Sid Zhil +++ :P

Anyway, hope it was helpful, I know I learned alot from that round, even tho it was my shortest one Thanks to all who were with me then. Never really got a chacne to thank them all. Not many of them left either...

Anyway, if you plan to start an alliance, this post will probably help you alot. Cayl did a great job here. And dont be shy to talk to other alliances. Most of them are nice and friendly. I had deals with some alliances that were full, that they could send potantials they didnt have room for to me, and id consider giving them a chance(dont do this with every allie, but some of them if you know the HC, it might be very useful)

anyway :P

-Jonas-

__________________
When we discover the centre of the universe, alot of people will be shocked and dissapointed to know that they are not it!

I started an alliance this past round as well. I thought I might share my experience. I do know the essentials to starting and maintaining an alliance. The alliance I started, Empire, merged into Valhalla. After seeing how an alliance should NOT be run. My former members and the quality Valhalla members left to form their own alliance. I, for my own reasons, stepped down and handed my knowledge on to my predecessor.

First things First
Started an alliance isn't something that will happen overnight. You have to be willing to give a solid effort for an alliance. Building an alliance is sometimes a slow process that can take a few rounds. Be willing to start out slow. Are you in an IRC active galaxy, do you have friends that are in an IRC active galaxy? If so, create a joint IRC channel and have the members of each galaxy join it for attacks and defense calls. What you have setup is a sister galaxy. Next, start looking for more galaxies to join your merry bunch. Get as many members from each galaxy to join your new Pact. It doesn't matter if they are in another alliance, you are not asking them to join an alliance, just a defense and attack pact. After all, its for the good of their galaxy. Once you have done this you need to identify your leaders. They should not be hard to pick out. They will be the ones planning attacks, talking strategy, and organizing defense for your Pact. Approach these members about the idea of starting an alliance. Get them on board before approaching anyone else in the Pact.

Next Step
Start to get your technology organized. That means get IRC channels registered and outside forums setup. I know that Planetarion supplies some nice forums in game for your alliance to use, but they are simply to unorganized. Having an organized alliance will set you apart from others when recruiting. You should have several channels. First, create public and private channels. Have all of your members join your public channel right away. Place a key on the public channel to start out with and make sure the channel remains secret. Don't worry about adding all of your members to the public channel to be voiced, oped or whatever. It isn't important at this time. Next, switch your private channel to invite only. This is a more secure method and will make it easier for members to join the channel rather than having to check what the new key is. After all of your members are added, create an attack channel and a defense channel. The attack channel will only have your BC and HC oped and should be invite only. (Defense can also be fun out of the private channel. I find it easier to run defense out of a defense channel that allows for no other chatting. It helps organized defense quicker without an ongoing conversation interrupting you. btw, the defense channel should be invite only as well) Next you need to get your command structure setup. This will vary due to personal preferences but should have the 3 basics, Chief Executive Officer, Executive, and Officers. The CEO will be the leader of the alliance with a High Council to assist with various aspects of command. The officers will be added to help run daily alliance activities such as IRC officer, forum moderator and Battle and Defense commanders. Next you should setup outside forums for your members to join. There are various websites that offer free forums for anyone that signs up. Create public forums, private forums, and HC forums (It would be beneficial to have a member of the alliance that actually knows how to manage forums take care of this if you do not already know how to).

Moving Along
Now that you have all of your technology organized you need to start getting attacks and defense organized in your new channels. I would suggest using an IRC Attack bot. It is free to download and very simple to use once you read the readme.txt file. Have each of your HC and all of your BC's keep a copy of the bot and be able to run the bot on any attack if needed. Your BC's should be in charge of getting the bot up and running in the channel on each and every attack.

Sign on the dotted line
Your next step should be to recruit ACTIVE members. Start by opening your public channel up by removing the key. Let people find your channels and inquire about your alliance. Placing an 'Ad' on the alliance recruitment forums isn't a bad way to recruit. But finding non-alliance members on IRC is even better. If you find them on IRC, chances are they are IRC active. When on IRC type /list and get a list of all of the open public channels on netgamers.org's servers. Then just pop in and start a conversation with the people there. Good channels to look for are possible galaxy channels. It is a possibility that they are not in alliance but are looking. Help them find you. Some people like to message GC's in game, this is not a very effective or respectful way to do recruiting. Most people that get these messages are annoyed by them and just brush them off. Plus, if they are in another alliance, you just gave up the coords to your High Commands galaxy. Not Good. However you find members I strongly suggest that you only recruit on IRC. If they apply on the in game tag, reject them. If they really want to join you they will find you on IRC.

A small point leaps to mind, which I think applies to new and old alliances alike.

Do not use a private alliance IRC server unless you know damn well what you're doing

I see so many HCs who fall in love with the idea of starting up a private IRC server because it's 'more secure' (and because they want to be an Operator). It doesn't matter how easy it is to run UnrealIRCd from your cable connection, or that you understood the ircu installation file enough to run it on your £10/month shell account. Private alliance IRC is by far the easiest way to:
a) alienate members from new startup alliances,
b) divulge secret information to spies
c) create more communications downtime when the server inevitably goes offline (no, the internet isn't invincible)

I've lost count of the number of times I've joined other alliance's servers to see attack information (and co-ords) in channels that weren't even set to secret mode. How often have you seen people accidently paste their password to a channel? What are the odds they use that password on your server too? If someone decides to 'borrow' that nick how can you be sure who they really are*? Are you using low-cost hosting or a home connection for your server? Expect downtime, during which your members will not be able to communicate with each other.

For a PA alliance to get any benefit out of private IRC you will need at least one experienced techie capable of handling and minimizing the related security/reliability issues. Anyone else can easily surive on irc.netgamers.org, with a public channel with modes +nt (check out the P manual for Floatlimit and Strictop options to stop spammers/takeovers), and a private channel set to +inst (give users level 24 P access to get invite). P has far better security and reliability than most homegrown attempts will be able to reach.

*90% of the alliances I've seen choose to run Epona/Anope as their services. This not only provides practically zero logging, but has a lovely 'feature' to allow people to steal a users access without being traced

__________________in my sig i write down all my previous co-ords and alliance positions as if they matter because I'm not important enough to be remembered by nickname alone.

Something esle that I dont think has yet been mentioned... I could be wrong however:

How to HC the alliance:

It is of absolutely no use to nobody if you start an alliance, follow all the advice given above but fail to be a successful HC.

When I started my alliance I did not realise the amount of work I would have to put in to it in order to get it to work. I started off only spending about 5 hours a day logged in to IRC (most af the time AFK) and I soon started seeing comments about inactive HCing in the alliance forums. This was only in the first week though so I was able to do something about it. Most days I will be logged in even if I'm at work (unless connection dies). I am now usually available 12 hours a day.

In order to be a successful HC in your alliance your own activity is key. Even more key than your members being active. As a leader you have to set an example. You set the standards. Everything your members can do... you should be able to better and faster. You should also make sure your staff follow your example. If you are not on IRC then you should ensure that another HC is, or at least a selection of Officers.

While most of the times it is your responsibility to handle issues taht arise within your alliance it is imperitive that all tasks be taken care of. That there is the reaon for Officers... people who dont have control of the alliance but can still do the specifics... here is a list of Officer duties you may need to think about:

Recruitment(Someone who interviews new recruits when you are not available)

Battle Commander(Somebody who is good at organising attacks)

Defense Commander(I know this thread is for nOObs, but do I really need to explain this?)

Security Officer (If your alliance becomes big enough or strong enough there may be factions wanting to gather intelligence on your alliance to foil plans etc. A security officer would route out any spies from your alliance)

I think one of the most important parts of a new alliance is missing, Self-promoting. You need to promote yourself in a way that shows you are professional and a good leader. Many times people start an alalinces and it seems like its the first time they ever played. That is the wrong thing to do and is usually(always) noticeable. I would also say don't even try to start an allaince if you dunno at least 5 people from PA already that wanna join. Play around in another alliance learn about people and make friends in the PA community. Talk to your galaxy mates and see what they are interested in. Learn the game. Then maybe you will be ready to start an alliacine.

With EMpire I think our biggest problem was self-promoting and the inability to intrigue a wide varity of players about us.

As HC you need to look at every angle and ideally have 2 other HC around you that you can play devils advocate with. Of course, you need to be able to come to quick and positive decisions. Having HC who specialise in certains area's may help work ethic.

Goals

Plan and plan some more for all the main area's of the alliance and try to have some direction for the alliance. What do you want to achieve? Just aiming for #1 alliance isnt good enough, not only will this likely provide false promises to keen members but it will deflate any energy to progress.

Spirit

Be realistic but optimistic and NEVER look down on your members, you must work hard to be best friends with all members. Bond with them and they will in turn bond with the alliance. It only takes 10 loyal members to open up recruitment through their network of contacts through a round. A strong spirit will also benifit activity, this being THE key aspect for PA success.

Promotion & Alliance Theme

A number of replys comment on promotion and marketting of your alliance, while i think this is important i dont think you should start this until alliance foundations are stable (active command staff, organised military). Experienced players will see right through a newer alliances publicity and they will not be attracted to it.

If you have yet to set your alliance in motion, then take time to figure out such things as alliance name & theme. Try to choose something that is original (the Wolf theme has been murdered goddamit;P) and will inspire and ignite the imaginations of your members, this can be useful when motivating members at times of war.

Being a good HC + good officer is not enough yet.
The most important thing would be to get all the members to be active and also very loyal and contributing to the goal(s) of the alliance, you will only achieve this when you will understand that people are fighting over something that they feel tied to, when the only thing that they could do is to attack and idle to send defense and that all, you will find very quickly that theses same players are often confused as guests or merecenaries as they dont have anything special (in relationships term) with the alliance, and basially dont feel like they owe the alliance something and can leave whenver they want.
You need to push the members to be more and more involved in the alliance, push them to care about the situation, if you have 100% of the members who care about the alliances and push the alliance all the time, its a win-win situation,
This is their alliance as much its your alliance, the only way to progress is to tie them to the alliance with the strongest tie you can find, this is called a Community.
Never act like you own the place,
Never act like its only your alliance and the members are like guest.
If you do understand this and never look down at your members, and take responsabilitie then you are on the good way.

we got the member base but we aint got the tools not a coder who knows how to create those tools...

-chaddy-

You raise a pretty important issue that somehow got overlooked so far hehe. Techys as you imply (apart from being a general pain in the arse;P) are vital if your alliance wants to automate its systems to improve speed, accuracy and ease of use. Finding active, trustworthy techys is damn hard though.

All you can do untill ones pops up is to rely on the ingame arbiter (for your Command staff to arby check with), the ingame forum (which is pretty sh1t but it's better then nothing for static Coms) and your private Netgamer irc channels (real time Coms). Some of these are a bit crude but they will fullfill your basic alliance needs untill something better comes along.

we got the member base but we aint got the tools not a coder who knows how to create those tools...

-chaddy-

Don't fret about it, the techie is probably the hardest member to find, especially for smaller alliances. He has to be competant, active and very loyal to the alliance (as he would generally have access to everything). Concentrate on expanding your memberbase with loyal players and soon enough you'll find someone willing and capable of providing tech services. The ingame tools are certainly adequate for your needs, I can't think of anything essential you're doing without.

__________________in my sig i write down all my previous co-ords and alliance positions as if they matter because I'm not important enough to be remembered by nickname alone.

mmm ok well then the tools i was after were told like an arbiter between two alliances as well as a def bot mostly things for mirc but atm i guess i'll bide my time expanding and hoping for a techie...

Starting a brand new alliance and raising your alliance to the next level and being a real competitor for #1 are two different guides entirely. Lodoom I'm sure wouldn't get much out of this particular thread... but you're right, tech is one way to consolidate power over your members, and make their activities more efficient. Back in the days of cluster alliances, we put a lot of work into having an easy and powerful tech base to deploy. The startup CA with the best tech and semi-eloquent speakers generally did the best in recruiting and so forth.

Re: How to start a brand new alliance or (HC 101) [READ THIS BEFORE POSTING]

I just want to add how to get P in a mIRC channel.

1: You need two supporters to register a channel.
2: Go to www.netgamers.org and register ALL your nicks. That means all three persons.
3: Then you click on This link: http://www.netgamers.org/module.php?mod=cservice&action=chanreg and register your channelname and the two registered nicks of the supporters.
4: The supporters have to write /msg p support #alliancechannelname YES.
5: As soon as the process have been completed (you can watch this by checking the channelinfo box on www.netgamers.org) you can get P to join by using this command : /msg p set #channel autojoin on (the person registering the channel that is, not the supporters)

Re: How to start a brand new alliance or (HC 101) [READ THIS BEFORE POSTING]

Quote:

Do you know anyone you can trust absolutely to help you out?

nope, not in PA, how shall this be possible?

and furthermore:

If a former Fury-Officer tells N00bs better not to ally you prolly better should do it -
I mean he was Fury after all, and they didnt like n00bs at all...

__________________
Peace is a lie, there is only passion.
Through passion, I gain strength.
Through strength, I gain power.
Through power, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken.
The Force shall free me.

Re: How to start a brand new alliance or (HC 101) [READ THIS BEFORE POSTING]

having to rebuild insomnia pre round 17 into a fighting force from nothing i can very well sympathise with people creating new alliances and the difficulties they face.

end of the day its not what you know its who you know. if you have the right connections and friends among the universe it is easier to recruit players via word of mouth and easier to get other HC's to do you favours. We recruited some old insomnia players and then a few random people and their friends, we avoided open recruitment as much as possible with the view to hand picking our own players. In the end it was a tactic that paid off with inSomnia ending round 17 with a final rank of 3rd (ins ftw).

I guess what im saying is if your new to the game its perhaps better to play some time in established alliances and make connections. Once a couple of rounds have passed it will become easier to attract friends to join you in the building of your new alliance

__________________

Runner up in the InSomnia 'Drunkest HC' competition - Currently on the wagon

I keep seeing threads by people who are frustrated in their attempts to create a new alliance. So allow me to give a little advice.
First, why are you starting an alliance? There are lots of good ones out there already. There are only two answers:

The first is that you're already a group of friends who hangs out and attacks and defense together, you might as well give yourselves a name and invite others to join. This is by far the best way to start an alliance.

The second is that you are a power hungry person in search of peons to direct at your whim. This is also fine, but you'll have to do a lot more work to be even slightly successful. If this is you, just be honest with yourself about it, it will make things so much easier down the road.

...

My reason for creating a own alliance in r19 is different from the both mentioned above:

3rd reason for creating a alliance:
After coming back to PA after a pause of several years in PT:185 of r19, i got bored of waiting until my first construction and research was finished in the 2nd tick i was online and wanted to experiment a bit with the options offered in the ALLIANCE pages of PA.

Soon i learned that this wasnt a very good idea, as you will have to wait 72 ticks after leaving a alliance before you can join another one, and decided to make the best out of it until i find a really good alliance to join which is worth the 72 tick waiting period.

First i tried to identify inactive possible targets for roiding them after my 72 tick by sending them messages from my alliance, as i dont give away my coordinates with messages sent from the ALLIANCE pages.
But after one of the receipients joined my alliance, i decided to try to merge with other small alliances which resulted in a alliance big enough to get into the Top30 alliances of r19 ~360 ticks = 15 days since the creation of my alliance.

As i didnt want to leave the other mostly HARMLESS inactive n00bs in my alliance without some help from a experienced and active player, i am currently reluctant to leave them alone unless i get a really good offer to join one of the TOP alliances, which has to be better than Insurrection, or i have merged them with a active small alliance.

Re: How to start a brand new alliance or (HC 101) [READ THIS BEFORE POSTING]

To be a good HC, my template would be:

1. Know the game. If you haven't played the game long, or have been away for a number of rounds, then you'll be better off working up as an officer in an alliance rather than just starting your own. Experience more than likely will lead to success.
2. Have an agenda for each round - What are your goals? What do you aim to get out of the round? Be realistic. If you are starting a new alliance and don't have many members then you can build on each round. Create a moto and stick to it.
3. Identify your strengths and weaknesses. What are you good at from a personal level and what are you good at as a group of people? How can you improve?
4. Build a command structure that maximizes on your strengths and attempts to improve where you are weaker. Start from a small group of core people that fulfill each role (defence, attack, intelligence, recruitment) and then recruit to fill in the gaps and expand the numbers.
5. Build an infrastructure - IRC channels, a website, identify tools that your alliance will use for the game. Web forums are great.
6. Plan your round - create targets/milestones for the alliance. How many people should you have by a certain tick? What should your average roid count be? What should the ideal average score be? These will help guide the command group, present a challenge to your members and assist recruitment with benchmarks for members. You may want to consider the ratio of each ingame race. Is it balanced?
7. Form relations with other alliance leaders - Most rounds have been won on politics. You do not have to play on the same side, but you should know and be able to start a dialogue with the heads of other alliances. You should also try to make friends with some of them, in case you can benefit each other later in the round or share intel. This is a very social game.
8. Be dedicated to the task - If you want to be a good HC you need to be accessible and available for large amounts of the time each day.
9. Have fun - if you're not having fun, then why play? If you are having fun then your attitude will be much more positive and this will be reflected within the alliance.
10. Lose the ego - Just because you're the leader that doesn't mean you're any more of a person than the "lowest" member of the alliance. Get over yourself if you have dellusions of grandeur. Ultimately this is just a database with a fancy front end and all you're doing is changing the numbers in it. Be yourself and don't get big headed.